Alabama is set to execute Ronald Smith on December 8, although the sentencing jury in his case recommended that he be sentenced to life. Under a practice that is no longer permitted in any other state, Smith’s judge overrode the jury’s sentencing recommendation and imposed a death sentence. As his execution approaches, Smith has filed a petition in the U.S. Supreme challenging the constitutionality of Alabama’s law. He argues it violates both his right to have a jury determination of all facts that are a prerequisite to imposing the death penalty, and a national consensus against judicial disregard of jury capital sentencing verdicts. Smith’s petition notes that “Alabama is the only state that allows a judge to sentence a defendant to death when the jury has recommended a sentence of life.” His lawyers also have petitioned Governor Robert Bentley for clemency, quoting a juror who said, “It was very painful to make such a difficult decision, only to have the judge disregard it.” A recent report by the Brennan Center on Justice found that “electoral pressures influence judges’ decisions in capital cases,” including Alabama’s practice of judicial override, which accounts for one-fifth of Alabama’s death row. Earlier this year, state courts in Florida and Delaware—the only other states that had permitted judicial override—struck down sentencing statutes that permitted judges to impose death sentences in the face of jury recommendations for life or non-unanimous recommendations for death. These decisions grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2016 ruling in Hurst v. Florida that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” Smith’s attorneys argue that Alabama’s judicial override practice violates Hurst. Alabama’s attorney general disagrees, arguing that the Alabama statute is different from Florida’s because it requires the jury to find the existence of an aggravating factor making the defendant eligible for death. Smith’s lawyers also argue that “[t]his life-and-death decision is being made by judges facing intense electoral pressure,” rendering such overrides unconstitutionally arbitrary. Smith was never able to obtain review of these issues in federal court because his attorney made an error in paying a filing fee. Though his claims were filed by the deadline, his lawyer, who was on probation for public intoxication at the time, assumed he did not have to pay a filing fee of $154 because his client was indigent. In addition to his judicial override challenge, Smith is also part of a group of death row inmates challenging Alabama’s new lethal injection protocol, which would use midazolam, a drug involved in several botched executions over the last few years.
(“Alabama Death Row inmate Ronald Bert Smith asks US Supreme Court to stop execution,” Associated Press, December 2, 2016; A. Liptak, “Lawyers Stumble, and Clients Take Fall,” The New York Times, January 7, 2013; K. Faulk, “Alabama death row inmate seeks clemency from governor,” AL.com, December 1, 2016.) See Sentencing and Arbitrariness. Read Ronald Smith’s clemency petition.
